It’s about more than porn, really, and functions as a concise explanation of what it’s like being a mid-sized social network in the shadow of the major platforms. Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s co-founder, posted on Tumblr explaining why the old policy – “Go nuts, show nuts. Which takes us to today, and the news that, well, that’s not going to happen. But Tumblr stuck around and – since the Automattic purchase – users have been pushing for the policy to be reversed. The ban caused a mild exodus from the site, as users skipped to other services with looser policies – primarily Twitter, which still allows adult content with few restrictions. As well as allowing explicit blogs, a significant chunk of the service’s community enjoyed the freedom of floating between fandom, erotica, pornography and conversation – until, in 2018, Verizon implemented a content policy with strict restrictions on adult content (including an infamous ban on “ female-presenting nipples”). But in its years at Verizon, one change stuck: the “porn ban”.įrom its early days, Tumblr had an unusually open attitude to porn.
Only two years later it was spun off and sold to Automattic, the makers of the popular WordPress platform. The company’s CEO remained unchanged, “advertising goals weren’t met”, Yahoo wrote down more than $700m of the acquisition, and then the whole company was acquired by Verizon in 2017.
In 2013, it was acquired by Yahoo for $1.1bn, then promptly ignored. The rough edges have stuck around for so long, in part, because Tumblr has spent years as the barely tolerated subsidiary of some of the world’s largest companies. Even the commercial model is odd: as well as targeted adverts, the site sells an “ad-free” experience (for $40 a year), offers a Patreon-style subscription services (called Post+), and recently launched Tumblr Blaze, a bizarre promoted-post service that lets users spend $10 to show their content to a completely untargeted selection of 2,500 users, and has been gleefully adopted by the community for a sort of esoteric trolling. It leads to a freewheeling community, where the best posts are enhanced, elaborated and riffed on even as they are shared further.Īnd users can’t simply reply to a post – you either reblog it (sharing it and your comment with friends), send a private message about it, or you send a semi-public “ask”, a reply that the recipient can then, if they want, publish, creating a whole new chain of conversation.
Rather than a content model built around posts, images or videos, for instance, Tumblr’s key unit is a thread: a post, its reblogs, their tags and all the content that rides with them. The social network, which launched in 2007 – a few months after Twitter – has always had its quirks.
#TUMBLR WALLPAPERS PLUS#
Twitter’s strict text-only, reverse-chronological, 140-character timeline is now algorithmically curated, offering 280 characters plus a range of multimedia Instagram posts can be reshared in Snapchat-style stories, which can also contain TikTok-style videos TikTok pivoted towards political content and now plays a leading role in the culture wars. Over the years, some of the largest social networks have filed those quirks off, pushing for a homogeneity that is more accessible to all, even at the expense of what makes them unique. TikTok – built by people who knew what they were doing – carefully sculpted its quirks to nudge users in its preferred direction, boosting harmless dance trends and discouraging political rants of the sort that litter competitor YouTube. The anonymity offered by 4chan lead, perversely, to a uniformity of tone, as users conform to the zeitgeist of the site, unable to build a name for themselves as an individual. Instagram’s lack of a repost feature pushed users to rely on hashtags to spread their pictures across the network, sowing the seeds of the heavily interest-based communities that still live there today. T he quirks and oddities of a social network affect the community that grows up around it.
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